God, are we going
to split hairs? Maxine! Maxine!" He came close to her and put out his
arms, but with a fierce gesture she evaded him; then, as swiftly, caught
his hand.

"Oh, Ned! Oh, Ned! Can't you see?"

"No!" said Blake, simply. "I cannot."

"Listen! Then listen! I know myself for an individual--for a definite
entity; I know that here--here, within me"--she struck her breast--"I
have power--power to think--power to achieve. And how do you think that
power is to be developed?" She paused, looking at him with burning eyes.
"Not by the giving of my soul into bondage--not by the submerging of
myself in another being. That night in Petersburg I saw my way--the hard
way, the lonely way! Oh, Ned!" She stopped again, searching his face,
but his face was pale and immobile--curiously, unnaturally immobile.

With a passionate gesture, she flung his hand from her. "Oh, it is so
cruel! Can't you see? Can't you understand? I left Russia to make a new
life; I made myself a man, not for a whim, but as a symbol. Sex is only
an accident, but the world has made man the independent creature--and I
desired independence. Sex is only an accident. Mentally, I am as good a
man as you are."

"Ten times a better man," said Blake, startingly. "But not near so good
a woman. For I know the highest thing--and you do not."

"The highest thing?"

"Love."

"Ah!" She threw up her hands in despair and walked to the window,
looking up blankly at the stars. Then, suddenly, she spoke again,
tossing her words back into the room.

"I suppose you think I am happy in all this?"

He was silent.

"I suppose you think I find this heaven?"

At last he answered. He came across to her; he stood looking at her with
his strange new expression of inscrutability.

"Oh, Maxine!" he said, "why must you misjudge me? Little Maxine, who
could be taken in my arms this minute and carried away to my castle,
like a princess of long ago--but who would break her heart over the
bondage! I haven't much, dear one, to justify my existence--but the gods
have given me intuition. I do not think you are in heaven."

He waited a moment, while in the sky above them the stars looked down
impartially upon the white domes of the church and the beacons of
pleasure in the city below.

"Maxine! Shall I say the things for you that you want to say?"

She bent her head.

"Well, first of all, God help us, the world is a terrible tangle; and
then you have a strange soul that